Power consumption - Power off / Deep Standby Request

6.3 W is a lot. I have an older playbar, which consumes a little less. In most rooms we have pairs of ONEs or some older Play 1. 3W each, 6W per room. Far too much for doing nothing most of the time.

With rising energy prices here (€ 0.45), I roughly calculate 12 €/year for each 3 Watts-speaker. We have a collecion of 24. Everyone I talk to, powers-off with some kind of switch. If that’s not Sonos policy, they ignore reality of their users.

This could be hard to implement on older speakers, but Sonos does strive to cut down on stand by power consumption: https://sustainability.sonos.com/Product-Sustainability/default.aspx#:~:text=Increasing%20energy%20efficiency,devices%20to%20lower%20energy%20consumption.

Sonos does not seem to ignore this.

This is how I justified a purchase of an Era-100 to replace two P1s + Amazon Echo (9.5w total standby, according to vendors websites) vs Era-100 (1.86w). The electricity saved over expected life span will pay for the up front cost 😀

Sonos will officially say their products are designed (from a function point of view) to be left on all the time, but modern well designed electronic devices can go through 100’s or 1000’s of power cycles. If they fail, probability says they will fail in early life (in warranty) or end of life, I recall some bath tub graph.

Apply some common sense, if you have a room that is ‘in standby’ (doing nothing most of the time), eg guest room, power down unused equipment. A Soundbar that is used on the main TV daily, keep it on standby.

Thanks for this.  I’ll just say I was trying to conserve power by not looking this up myself, rather than laziness.  

@106rallye thanks for the link. Below 2 Watts is an improvement. They are aware of that problem. obviously. I’d still consider to switch off a stereo pair e.g. in guest room or basement though, Certainly depends on frequency of use.

@craigski Era 100/300 replace former ONE and FIVE. I have a bunch of ONEs, I’ll probably want the latest toy at some point. As of now I’m still super happy though. I suspect you also didn’t throw your P1s on the trash. That’s what happend to my P1s a few years ago, I upgraded the systems upstairs, and found a spot for the P1s elsewhere. Still perfect stereo sound - no complaints - e.g. in the sauna. It’s not often used, makes no sense to leave them on standby.

What usually happens with a dumb switch, you go downstairs in a bathrobe, switch it on. But phone is upstairs. Waiting for booting, get your phone, play around with app and set it up is annoying.

I guess this is pretty common szenario for the users: You power up, and want it to play with recent setup after ~90 seconds of booting. I’d think, technically this should be well feasible with existing hardware.

If a unit, perhaps the guest room has been powered down for a while, it will likely need to be updated when powered up.

@buzz. For sure it has implications, just looks easy from my simple user perspective. Maybe worthwhile a consideration. As said, I solved it for me with IFTTT which is not working too well unfortunately. I thought about a raspberry PI with home automation. Supposed to work well with Sonos, but It’s another “permanent-on” device while I’m trying to minimize consumption.

Era 300 is not really a replacement for the Five, as the Five is considered to be the superior speaker of stereo or mono sources. This is why Sonos no longer sells the Sonos One, but does still sell the Five.

Makes sense. Era 300 is probably considered a successor of old Play 3.

Sure, as you add more management devices that consume power, you need to consider the overall payback. Specifically with the PI, maybe it doesn’t need to be always ON. You might only need it to make configuration changes. It might require some physical work, but controlling power relays wired to a central point (the PI) would probably reduce total power requirements vs distributed smart switches. Lookup “latching relay’.